I was looking into our cargo formula, it is very much influenced by the amount of cargo you carry. While you always get more revenue the more cargo you carry, the revenue per kg decreases. Looking at the data the break even point seems to be around 8000 kg, below that your getting more per kg of cargo than economy pax while above your getting less. A 744 with 400 pax and 40000 kg of cargo is getting half the revenue per kg for the cargo compared to people, while a 738 with 185 pax and 2500 kg of cargo is getting almost twice per kg for cargo than pax. It does make sense to me that the more cargo you carry the lest your going to get per kg, although our curve may be a bit steep.

Incidentally I found a site for United Airlines Cargo last night and was playing with there cost estimator, for a 200 kg package the cost was about the same weather I shipped it from KSFO to KLAX (420$), KORD(440$) or KMIA (440$), KJFK was a bit higher at 560$ and EGLL was almost 2000$. Not sure I can use that much to come up with a formula.

My current thoughts for reforming cargo is having for each airport having an input and and output bucket for cargo that would be based on the population around that airport, where each day some amount of cargo would come into the output bucket and some would be removed from the input bucket. Price would be based on how full/empty those buckets are and what percentage of the cargo is being taken by that flight. Once the departure airports output bucket is empty or the arrival airports input bucket is full no more cargo could be flown between those airports. We do something similar for passengers but there we have only one bucket, since most passenger trips are round trips while cargo is almost always one way. We would have to do something to take into account hub airports.

As it is right now we have pilots flying AN-225's between cities of population both in the 100k range or less and getting full loads, and that's probably not right.

I see what you are talking about on cargo, American International has many kinds of cargo airlines that do different kinds of routes that are all 100% flightaware based. We have several i guess you could say kinds of cargo flights. We have our On-demand charter cargo operators, ACMI (on-demand and contract basis), and scheduled.

So for out on-demand operatots (I used to work in this business) routes typically go one way. For example a Kalitta Charters Lear 35C route might go KYIP-KSHV-KLRD-KYIP. The suprise for on-demand is that flights like that they only leg they are full is KSHV-KLRD. Now they might do more legs in a trip than that. Some of the on-demands do scheduled contract flights, for example every night IFL Group flys a Dassault Falcon 20 from KTVF-KSFD-KTVF for UPS. The one thing to take note about is the on-demand operators fly aircraft that range from a Lear 35 to a Boeing 727-200F. This could make an issue for cargo volume when the flights take a Dc9-33F in to a small airport like KMQY due to the low population in the area.

An example of our ACMI operators that we have and are flightaware based are ABX Air and Air Transport International. ABX and ATI primarly fly out of KCVG since there two largest contracts (Amazon and DHL) are based out of there. They have an interesting route network that does not always bring them directly back to KCVG in cases like ATI's amazon route structure. But DHL routes bring the aircraft back just like they would a scheduled airline like FEDEX or UPS.

I dont have acess to the forum for some reason, but I home this discussion will help you in making changes to the cargo routes. Because a strange thing that I noticed is a 747-400F from KMIA-TJSJ has never operated on a full load to a densly populated island. If you would like I can provide you with the ICAO of some of the airlines I am talking about so you can study there routes to get an idea of what I am talking about.

An idea I was thinking about, we could have the system generate 'packages' of various sizes, these would be randomly created at various airports and would each have to be delivered to a specific airport. Once picked up the packages would stay on the aircraft until either delivered to its destination or transferred to a warehouse (which airlines could create/rent at airports), if not delivered within a given time (week?) some penalty would be charged. Only when the package reached its destination would the money be earned.

An idea I was thinking about, we could have the system generate 'packages' of various sizes, these would be randomly created at various airports and would each have to be delivered to a specific airport. Once picked up the packages would stay on the aircraft until either delivered to its destination or transferred to a warehouse (which airlines could create/rent at airports), if not delivered within a given time (week?) some penalty would be charged. Only when the package reached its destination would the money be earned.

Since I'm managing a virtual cargo company, your excellent idea it was something we have been expected for long time. Please, think seriously about that, and try to implement it into the system.
Moreover, I have been thinking for long time how to ask you about to improve the cargo section with a new option which let our pilots to choose the kind of cargo items (for instance, fragile or not, dangerous or not) in orden to improve the pilot incomes, increasing at the same time the risk to loose extra money, in case an in-flight incident occurs, obviously. In the same way, the option to select the amount of cargo to be carried, would be nice. It is a way to simulate "real life" condition.

As an example, should I am ready to fly a B737-700 Freighter, able to carry 34000 LBS, I would like to choose to load only 28000 LBS, 9500 of fragile items (more expensive rate), and 18500 of "non fragile" goods (at less exprensive rate).

We are aware this improvement means a "workload" request, and it implies an aditional effort from your side. It is not just for tomorrow, but I think it worth to be beared in mind for a next future, always thinking in cargo airlines, of course.

Thankyou anyway, Joe.

Night navigation is so easy. Just try to maintain the plane between the red light on your left and the green one on your right.

Interesting idea's Juan, I had not considered 'Fragile' cargo before. So far I had thought about low priority, high priority and the 'special packages' mentioned before. Fragile would indicate if the AC landed too hard or experienced severe turbulence the cargo would be damaged. And if 'dangerous' or 'explosive' cargo were included that would result in the loss of the plane or maybe even the 'death' of the pilot.

Well, Joe. Your classification (low and high priority and special) would be also nice for our proposal. In case you are able to implement that categories of cargo, please, do it when possible.
And you are right about "fragile" cargo. In case of excesive banking, or too hard landing, that kind of cargo can be damaged, and therefore, the pilot should be charged with a penalty. On the other hand, METEO (I mean, turbulences, storms, etc.) mustn't be beared in mind, since it is a factor which pilots can not manage by themselves, and shouldn't be blamed on.

Concerning dangerous or explosive cargo, you are absolutely right. Better forget about that, we dont want to blow out any plane, loosing several virtual "lifes"

Night navigation is so easy. Just try to maintain the plane between the red light on your left and the green one on your right.

I would not divide the cargo into fragile, living animals, normal and what ever on the same flight. This is too much work (for the programmer). When I loaded fragile stuff, I have to do a smooth landing anyway. So lets load only one kind. If my landing is too hard, so I destroy some percents of cargo, depending on my "crashiness"

Deploying different packages on several HUBs sounds good, but helps only those airlines, which have some planes there. My HUB is Vienna [LOWW], I dont have the hope to find some packages there... And, if its implemented like the PAX routing, you have first to create a route, then book the flight and then you see, how much PAX/packages you loaded.You dont know it before. And what about indiviual pricing? For positioning packages there must be done a complete rework.

The packaging could be combined (or done at all) in a job market. Lets say, the system generates 500 or so "jobs" like "bring 80.000kg electronics from EDDC to EGLL, revard: xyz v$, job valid for the next 24h". Everyone can book this job, which makes it invisible for all others, then he/she must fly it, if not, there is a penalty, for the airline or the pilot, this is the question. Generating the jobs can be template based, some airports, some load, and this mixed up.

Certainly the special packages where you only get paid till it gets to its destination will be optional, the pilot will need to choose to accept them. Outside of that normal 'general' cargo should act more like the passengers. Given the size of the departure and arrival airport there will be an amount of cargo available. Only difference with cargo compared to passengers is that for passengers once they get somewhere, they then tend to want to go back to where they started while cargo will always be one way, unless the place the cargo landed is not its destination.

The damaging of fragile cargo I agree sounds more complicated and am not sure how it would work and if would really add much, we already have 'hard landing' penalties and maybe that is enough.

When in doubt KIS - Keep It Simple Most sim pilots want to fly not spend more time in pre flight planning than flying. I still would like to see a user selectable cargo amount on all aircraft, not just freight haulers so pilots can choose to reduce cargo / gross weight below MTOW if they so desire

You have lot of overweights? Hm, I get them very rare, in fact only, when I came from an airport, where the fueling is so cheap, that I take intentionally some kg more than simbrief says (e.g. OMDB). Nevertheless, adjusting the cargo load on pax mashines would be good, right.

But, correct me, if I am wrong, we are speaking about native cargo transports (at least I do ). I have some freighters in my fleet, they are actually grounded, because the income is much less than with PAX on the same route, so I wait for a rework and would be happy, if there could be different versions of cargo, like there are different classes on pax (first, business and sardine). A penalty for destroyed cargo, ok, we can forget it or write it to the very end of the todo list, when all other is done.

In summary, I would really like to see any way, that makes cargo flights usefull. I personally prefer cargo compared to pax, they are smelling, crying and make my seats dirty

It all comes back to the "exceeded max landing weight" advisory .... loading to max zero fuel weight is simply not possible with some aircraft where the max zero fuel weight is equal to the max landing weight. The current client "change" tab only drops off cargo/pax after fueling to make max takeoff weight .... so one literally has to land on empty to avoid the dreaded 'exceeded max landing weight" advisory. This is what I have been talking about all along since that feature came out. I know Joe worked on reducing max landing weights to allow for some reserve fuel but in the real world some airplanes simply cannot haul "max payload" as those numbers are for sales purposes and not for everyday operations. Sure it can haul that much if you take one trip around the airport and land .... The aircraft manufacturing industry is notorious for "juiced numbers" when it comes to sales pitch performance vs. real world applications.

Last edited by Cat on Tue Dec 18, 2018 5:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.